revoking / evoking intimacy: where queer plastic and black feminist eco-poetics touch

Authors

  • Ama Budge Johnstone University of the Arts London, Sandberg Institute, University of Johannesburg
  • Heather Davis The New School

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17169/ogj.2025.302

Keywords:

Body, Black Feminism, Climate Colonialism, Pleasure, Queer

Abstract

The following text is an edited iteration of a conversation between Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone and Heather Davis. Together, we discuss how pleasure, eroticism, and intimacy are taken up in each of our work as sometimes the site of liberation and sometimes as an enrollment into environmental and social violence. We engage these ideas through our different positionalities as well as through our research on climate colonialism and plastic.

Author Biographies

Ama Budge Johnstone, University of the Arts London, Sandberg Institute, University of Johannesburg

Dr. Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, scholar and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she terms “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, erotics and the more-than-human in queer and speculative ways toward interspecies futures. Ama is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London, an MFA tutor at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and a Research Associate at VIAD (University of Johannesburg). She was recently awarded a PhD from Birkbeck University of London.

Heather Davis, The New School

Heather Davis is Director and Associate Professor of Culture and Media at The New School. An interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture through plastic. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

References

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Budge Johnstone, Ama Josephine (2021): Pollination as Practice. The Queer Temporalities of Intimate Ecologies. In: Brandt, Nicola/Whorrall-Campbell, Frances (Ed.): Conversation Across Place, Berlin: The Green Box, 69–85.

Davis, Heather (2022): Plastic Matter. Durham: Duke University Press. doi: 10.1215/9781478022374

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membra(I)nes: article cover

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Published

2025-11-07

How to Cite

Budge Johnstone, A., & Davis, H. (2025). revoking / evoking intimacy: where queer plastic and black feminist eco-poetics touch. Open Gender Journal, (1). https://doi.org/10.17169/ogj.2025.302

Issue

No. 1 (2025): Special Issue: membra(I)nes - Technologies, Theories and Aesthetics of Im/Permeability

Section

Essay

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Ama Budge Johnstone, Heather Davis

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